After being in business for as long as I have, there's one thing that never fails to amaze me -- the capacity entrepreneurs have to sabotage their own success. (Not to mention how creative those ways can be.) While there are about a million ways this manifests itself, here's one way I see popping up over and over again.
And that's timing.
What do I mean by timing? I mean either entrepreneurs are moving too slow, and thus miss opportunities to make money, or they move too fast and are reckless and miss out on opportunities that way.
What's interesting about timing is it's not as clear-cut as "one person moves too slow and one person moves too fast." What I actually see is entrepreneurs move BOTH too fast AND too slow. They just do it at the wrong times.
And where do I see this happen the most? When they're planning to launch a new product or program.
Here's what typically happens -- people will move WAY too slowly creating the product or program and will move WAY too fast to launch it, with the end result being they miss out on opportunities on both sides. It takes them forever to actually get things done (so they've missed out on money selling the product or program) and then they rush through the launch like they have a bunch of hungry vampires chasing them, and they don't make nearly the sales they could have.
What REALLY should be happening is they should move quickly creating the product then slow down while launching it. That way, they get the best of both worlds -- they get the product or program to market faster and can start profiting from it sooner, and they take their time to work through ALL the launch steps so they wring as many sales as possible during the launch.
Now, there are variations of this. I have met people who are slow during the product creation AND launch, just like I've met people who whip through both as well. (And then there's another group of people who either never get their product done or they finish products and never actually get around to launching them.) All of these are sabotaging techniques, which is part of the reason why this is a far more complex problem than would initially appear on the surface.
So if you suspect you might struggle with one or several of the above, what can you do? How can you stop it? And how much time do you REALLY need to launch? Well, I'm going to answer all those questions over the next two articles. Next week we'll look at why it takes some entrepreneurs so darn long to finish their product and how they can speed up the process, and the week after we'll cover racing through the launch process.
Keywords: Business success tips, business success strategy, small business
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Is Your Timing Keeping You From Being Successful In Your Business? Part 1
